Been plowing through the back catalog of my RSS feeds, trying to catch up after SXSW, and I found a great discussion over at Alley Insider about 15 roles every startup needs filled.

The most fascinating part is the back and forth, I think. The original post posits many of the 15 are unneeded or can be combined – we started with six, and I think to some extant that it was true that you can combine some in the short term. But very rapidly, most of those positions need to be expanded out into individuals. If anything, I think the 15 roles (plus the obvious omission of biz dev, called out in the comments) is a great map for scaling your organization from whatever it is you start out with.

Also, the discussion in the comments is really interesting – gives a lot of insight into some of the key challenges, debates, and viewpoints about team size and startups. Lately, personally, I’ve been landing on the side of larger teams – experts who aren’t torn between divided loyalties, and each important aspect of a job having a dedicated advocate. There’s a TON of internal debate about such things, though, and no shortage of people here at the company that feel smaller teams are more effective.

Personally, I think sometimes we let our nostalgia and our personal enjoyment get into this conversation a bit. It’s easy to look back on “the good old days” when we were all running around like chickens with our heads cut off, making a great project. But sometimes I look at our work now, an old project that I remember fondly as being a great project, side-by-side with a new project done via a process, and the work is almost always better now. And people have personal lives here, which I think is a pretty great accomplishment. Really, a lot of the times process probably gets a bad rap, as it has to compete in comparison with our nostalgia.

Nut that’s a whole different topic. Look at the roles, and tell me what you think – I think UX designer and biz dev are the obvious omissions. I also have a hunch toolsmith, lead developers and CSS coder could be combined, but I’m sure that’s probably a bit contentious.